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Edward Snowden Scandal Ended Year of Living Dangerously

EDITOR’S NOTE:Two years ago this week, I shared the piece below under a similar headline as above. In light of things such as the hacking of millions of personnel records held by the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management, I believe it’s worth sharing again with only minor revisions. Please read and share.

Click image above to order a copy of The Clapper Memo.

It’s been a year of living dangerously since Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. announced his plan to bring an end to the glut of national security leaks that had many questioning his performance as the nation’s top intelligence official. I use the word, dangerously, because his plan simply hasn’t worked.

Doubts about DNI Clapper’s performance have increased, some in Congress — including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) — have called for his resignation or firing, and a scandal of epic proportions (a.k.a., “The Edward Snowden-National Security Agency-PRISM Scandal”) threatens to bring down the man atop the nation’s 17-agency Intelligence Community.

At the heart of the scandal, but not reported outside of these pages, is a question I raise after having conducted an exhaustive, four-year investigation into the use — and, in some cases, non-use — of polygraph and non-polygraph technologies by federal government agencies:

“How did Edward Snowden pass the polygraph exams required by his stints of employment as an intelligence professional?”

I made it clear in a headline published soon after the Snowden surfaced: Polygraph Exams Should Have Caught Edward Snowden. Of course, I should have added “If polygraph technology worked in the first place.” But I digress.

Screenshot of piece published June 18, 2013.

I questioned how Snowden, who had been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency before landing at defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, could have passed the necessary polygraph exams.

I shared the opinion of an expert:

Because his level of access would have required it, according to a source of mine (name withheld) who boasts almost three decades of counterintelligence work, Snowden must have taken — and passed – several polygraph exams as a condition of his multiple stints of employment with three-letter intelligence agencies and at least one government contractor,…

Plus, I shared a logical observation about Snowden, a man on the run from his government:

If, indeed, Snowden had had thoughts about exposing government secrets while employed by the CIA, the results of the polygraph exam(s) he took prior to and during his employment by that agency should have yielded clues to that could have led examiners to the truth about Snowden’s mindset. File this under, “Should have. Could have. Would have.”

Six days after publishing the polygraph-should-have-caught-Snowden piece, new observations about national security-related procedures surfaced in a Federal Timesarticle.

Gregg Prillaman, a former Department of Homeland Security official, reportedly said that obtaining a security clearance in a post-Snowden world will likely be much tougher and take longer as a result of, among other things, the need to require more polygraph exams.

One needs only look at how well the polygraph has performed as an investigative tool to combat corruption in Mexico and to screen Afghan recruits to understand that DNI Clapper’s approach is flawed from the outset.

In my second nonfiction book, The Clapper Memo, I share never-before-published details about the polygraph and about a “turf war” between polygraph loyalists and all challengers to their century-old technology that has been raging silently for more than 40 years. In addition, I share details — straight from the sources on the ground — about how both technologies have performed at Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq, Kuwait, Mexico, Qatar and elsewhere around the world. Most importantly, I connect the dots between three memos — including one issued by Clapper in 2007 while he was serving as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence — and hundreds of American casualties resulting from “Green-on-Blue” or “Insider” attacks waged by so-called Afghan “allies” wearing the uniforms of their country.